Every brand gets performance reports through their providers, which furnish a stunning array of metrics on just about anything that happens on or through the platforms they measure.

Yet many brands are unsure about their measurement and want to become more confident. They want to know what metrics are available, what is known about them, how to select them, and how to analyze and report them in ways that help them understand the impact of their digital initiatives.

The Digital Metrics Field Guide: The Definitive Reference for Brands using the Web, Social Media, Mobile Media, or Email, written by Stephen D. Rappaport , with the support of the Advertising Research Foundation, and published by BIS Publishers does just that. This unique, comprehensive resource was intended for those of us who use metrics and need straightforward, authoritative, non-technical guidance.

The Digital Metrics Field Guide explains:

six questions to ask for choosing the right metrics

how not to make the mistake of optimizing to platform metrics and how to optimize to brand objectives

197 of the generally available metrics

Every metric entry in The Digital Metrics Field Guide includes:

answers a question the metric addresses

defines and calculates the metric, and provides examples along with any technical notes

identifies the sources used as authorities for the definition

relates to other entries through cross-references

Every entry provides context, making the Digital Metrics Field Guide even more valuable to practitioners:

Field Notes, labeled as “ARF Comments,” review relevant research about a metric. Notes typically summarize 2-5 studies and explain the strengths, limitations and issues surrounding each metric. The research sometimes challenges or debunks the conventional wisdom around a metric, which helps readers avoid unproductive strategies and costly mistakes. All research is properly cited with links provided.

Marketing Stage: the Field Guide utilizes a nurturing model that is appropriate to digital-Capture, Connect, Close and Keep, and assigns metrics to each.

Metrics assigned to media types and channels

Paid, owned or earned: Metrics are assigned to one or more of these media types

Web, social, mobile or email: Metrics are assigned to one or more of these channels.

The Digital Metrics Field Guide offers perspective:

The emergence of humetrics: Because digital measurement captures what people are saying, doing and feeling, metrics become a way to understand people as people living their lives. Measures are no longer impersonal counts or percentages, but insights into human beings.

Trends and directions in measurement: Twelve experts contributed essays on measurement today and how to take it forward in the humetrics era.

Stephen is a sought after keynote speaker, panel moderator, business school lecturer, and workshop leader for such organizations and brands as: the Advertising Research Foundation Conferences, World Federation of Advertisers, Japan Advertising Association, Canadian Marketing Association, Marketing Accounting Standards Board, Institute for Public Relations; Travel and Tourism Research Association, American Association of Wine Economists, The Wharton School, Columbia Business School, New York University, Johnson & Johnson, Capital One, Ford Motor Company and many other brands. Click here to contact Stephen regarding your talk or workshop.

Reading a history of the English Coffeehouse reveals striking parallels between its rise and impacts in the 17th and 18th centuries and 21st century social media. They remind us that social media enables, helping give voice to our humanity, expanding and extending our ideas and our selves, connecting and communicating with one another in ways simple and profound, even creating new industries, social organizations and economies.

Most important, the parallels teach us that many of us have asked the wrong question about social media analysis. It is not “Which social media are consumers using, when and what are they doing?” but rather, “How are people expressing their fundamental human nature through social media?”

Association Adviser, the newsletter from Naylor, the leading provider of print and online media and event management solutions exclusively serving the association marketplace, mentioned the Digital Metrics Field Guide in its year-end review of issues and trends for 2014. Penned by Hank Berkowitz, the article talks about the changes in social media measurement outlined in the Guide, and calls out the importance of “humetrics.”